You get a free operating system that allows you to change the look and feel. Menu, ALL, Appearance. it comes with so many choices, then you can go online and get more that will suit your taste for eye candy. Ugly? Please.

Linux mint 19 lets you use GTK2 &GTK3 as well as Gnome, a lot of nice themes out there.

You get a free operating system that allows you to change the look and feel. Menu, ALL, Appearance. it comes with so many choices, then you can go online and get more that will suit your taste for eye candy. Ugly? Please.

Spot on. If these "reviewers" have nothing better to do than nitpick over tertiary aesthetic issues which are easily changed then I have much better things to do than read their tripe! I move on, like they should if they can't see past the end of their noses.

You get a free operating system that allows you to change the look and feel. Menu, ALL, Appearance. it comes with so many choices, then you can go online and get more that will suit your taste for eye candy. Ugly? Please.

Linux mint 19 lets you use GTK2 &GTK3 as well as Gnome, a lot of nice themes out there.

The OEM look is just fine by me, I changed a few things. Find your happy place and let the naysayers talk their fool heads off.

I think that some of the default apps have something to do with the user perception of the distro. GIMP, Pix, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC, Rythmbox,Tomboy notes and maybe other apps are far from beautiful/modern in LM 19. Well, that's not LM's fault, but some people with less knowledge might think it is.

mintInstall(software store) is ugly, it has improved a lot but I still don't like it, like categories are just simple rectangles.

Mint's website and forums could look better too.

And I'm talking just about Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce are uglier in general.

Oh, cut out the whining and do something about it instead. phpBB (the forum software), Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce and the software manager are all open source. If you don't like them, pull the darned source code and rewrite them the way you like them.

mintInstall(software store) is ugly, it has improved a lot but I still don't like it, like categories are just simple rectangles.

Mint's website and forums could look better too.

And I'm talking just about Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce are uglier in general.

Oh, cut out the whining and do something about it instead. phpBB (the forum software), Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce and the software manager are all open source. If you don't like them, pull the darned source code and rewrite them the way you like them.

Good grief.

That's not whinning, it's feedback, not just mine, from several users comments/reviews about LM over time. It's useful to know what people like/don't like to improve things.

And I know that if I don't like something I can solve this in 30 minutes by distrohopping, I did this a lot already. And forking or making pull requests are not in my plans, that's for developers.

Google is wrong I built them last week in my spare time - and if anyone who thinks Mint is ugly will believe that is true. Personally I think 19 is the best looking yet and I love the backgrounds and everything is a lot clearer - but then I

It also doesn't help when you ignore everything you're being told. Stop spreading FUD, please. It doesn't help anyone.

And google also says the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens.

Google is wrong I built them last week on my dinner break and on me tea break I built the great wall of china and it only took half an hour. Which makes as much sense as saying Mint is ugly ! Tara is the best looking Mint yet and I love the new backgrounds. Mind you at my age with my eyesight failing I could be wrong

... it's feedback ... several users comments/reviews about LM over time. It's useful to know what people like/don't like to improve things.

You have provided absolutely zero evidence to substantiate that claim.

And I know that if I don't like something I can solve this in 30 minutes by distrohopping, I did this a lot already. And forking or making pull requests are not in my plans, that's for developers.

I was going to write about the Mint design philosophy and the reason it is the way it is but then I remembered that in your opening posts in this thread you explicitly stated "I customized mine to look like GNOME, I'm happy with the results". You have now moved the goalposts so I'm going to leave you to it.

... it's feedback ... several users comments/reviews about LM over time. It's useful to know what people like/don't like to improve things.

You have provided absolutely zero evidence to substantiate that claim.

If you see videos reviews, blog posts and read the comments you will see that some users that don't like how Mint looks, I thought most people knew about this, looks like I was wrong, that's life.

I was going to write about the Mint design philosophy and the reason it is the way it is but then I remembered that in your opening posts in this thread you explicitly stated "I customized mine to look like GNOME, I'm happy with the results". You have now moved the goalposts so I'm going to leave you to it.

Oh, it's not looking like that anymore lol, it was just an example of a different possibility, now I put the left panel in the bottom to behave like a dock and change the theme to Adapta-Nokto, nice theme by the way, it goes well with the Mint-Y-Aqua icons.

If you see videos reviews, blog posts and read the comments you will see that some users that don't like how Mint looks, I thought most people knew about this, looks like I was wrong, that's life.

You made an unsupported claim, and you persist in refusing and neglecting to back it up, then you try to shift the burden of proof to me. I may be 85 but I wasn't born yesterday, sonny.

Obviously there's no intelligent conversation to be had.

Well, you are free to believe in me or not. I'm noticing some hostility so I will stop contributing to this topic, I hope some people find this topic useful, if any improvement resulted from it, it was worth it spending time here.... if not, well, at least I tried.

If you see videos reviews, blog posts and read the comments you will see that some users that don't like how Mint looks, I thought most people knew about this, looks like I was wrong, that's life.

"Some" users will never like certain things you do. It's just the nature of the beast. The real goal is to do things that the "majority" of users are happy with. You also need to keep in mind that the first priority is actual Mint users. Not reviewers who changed distros every week because they don't like something. I personally spent a lot of time making sure the Mint-X theme we've used for a long time was updated for Mint19 so that long time users who loved that look would still easily be able to use.

That being said, imho, Mint could improve it's OOTB default look. But it's highly subjective. These types of things are the ones that get the most disagreement among devs when discussing them Everyone thinks something else looks "good". The fact is that it's fairly easy to change and make look the way you want if the default isn't for you.

When I give opinions, they are my own. Not necessarily those of any other Linux Mint developer or the Linux Mint project as a whole.

I've seen reviews saying that Mint looks outdated. But the funny thing is, whenever I've demonstrated it to people who have never used Linux before, not one of them has ever said such a thing. In fact, when I installed Mint on my mother's computer (dual booting with Win7), and we looked it over so she could get familiar with it, the first thing she said was " It certainly looks neat and tidy". (The second thing was "I thought this would be more difficult.")
I think we need to keep in mind who Mint is aimed at, and whether this group overlaps with the people who say it looks outdated or ugly.

Newcomers to Mint will in many cases welcome the familiar and conservative design, and not complain; people who have been using Mint for a while will, if they prefer a different look, simply customize the looks and not complain either. I'm not sure complaints from reviewers are all that important on a grand scale.

In other words, pretty much what JosephM said.

If your issue is solved, kindly indicate that by editing the first post in the topic, and adding [SOLVED] to the title. Thanks!

...my beloved ultra beautiful MATE desktop below - 100% true™ unixporn material...
It took me years of experience / tweaking to learn to customize it that much heavily...but it surely paid back:
nowadays it takes me less than 3 minutes to replicate on a default Mint install

Wrt the default LM Cinnamon theme, I personally prefer the bright looks of LM 17.x over the dark looks of LM 18.x/19.x.

Seems, LM developers like to change the looks of new versions of LM every 2 years mostly for change-sake.
....... Meanwhile, the dark looks of M$/Win 10 has remained mostly unchanged for the past 6 versions or 3 years.

At least, the looks of this LM forum has not changed much over the years.

...my beloved ultra beautiful MATE desktop below - 100% true™ unixporn material...
It took me years of experience / tweaking to learn to customize it that much heavily...but it surely paid back:
nowadays it takes me less than 3 minutes to replicate on a default Mint install